


Ain't It Funny How You Feel, When You're Finding Out It's Real

by Morbane



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Zombieland (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Crossover, Gen, Original Character(s), POV First Person, POV Original Character, Treat, Unreliable Narrator, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-28
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 02:48:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2212890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world rebuilds itself after the zombie apocalypse - or maybe tears itself apart all over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ain't It Funny How You Feel, When You're Finding Out It's Real

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rabbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabbit/gifts).



Right up until the week before Games Selection, I was tossing up whether or not to put my name down.

The thing that tipped me over was kind of small. I got passed over for the draft for the District 3 basketball team. We're a small district; I knew the competition, and I really thought I'd make it. I got some straight talk from my usual coach - he said my shooting and my dribbling and my passing were all fine, but as far as he could see, I hadn't been aggressive enough on the defense and I just didn't synch up well with others. For the trials, they'd thrown us together in teams drawn from a hat, and where I'd fallen down was in body language and signalling, and thinking ahead to the smartest place for everyone to be.

Basketball wasn't _the_ thing for me, originally. It was just a means to an end. Now I was thinking about that end again.

When Alistair and I were thirteen, we'd had a grand plan. We were going to go into the Games together. We'd train up, we'd sign up, we'd watch each other's backs, and we'd kick ass. We'd kill more zombies than anyone else ever had. They only take two from each District, but we knew we'd make the grade. We were going to play it safe and wait until we were 18 to go in. We were really serious about it. I did track and basketball, Alistair did track and squash and swimming. 

When we were sixteen, Alistair's name came up in the Golden Crop. 

The Crop is a list of the people of suitable age with the highest rankings on the Games test scores. (Everyone gets tested. They do it in school and at work and if you don't have either, they do it at your three-monthly health check.) It's an honour, showing up on that list. It doesn't mean you have to do anything. It just means that, of everyone in the District, your odds are supposed to be the best for winning. Or just surviving.

But I think it is kind of an influence. 

"Hey, good, we're doing something right," I said to Alistair. I was envious and trying to hide it. "But we've got a plan, remember? And you need to build up more muscle."

"Not according to District central, I don't," he said.

He put his name in. He didn't say anything to me about it. I'm not sure if it would have been better or worse if he'd tried to convince me to sign up early too. It would have been a wrench. I don't think I'd have thrown my lot in with him - but what if I had? Would it have helped?

Because of course he didn't come back.

He made it through the first two weeks. That's better than a lot of people. With every day he made it to the end of, every zombie he killed, I was more hopeful and more terrified. I was glued to the TV. I even yelled "Go Lex," as if somehow he'd know that I was using his Games name, even though I thought it was dumb. It was Lex for Lexington. You pick the name of a city or town from before the zombies when you go in. It should be somewhere that doesn't exist any more, but that you have a connection to. There's a story behind it, apparently, but no one really cares. It's just a tradition.

Anyway, he got bitten at night, when I wasn't watching, so I didn't see how he chose to go. There are lots of choices, and none of them are really good. It varies, how fast the bite takes you. Some two hours - some two days.

The other choice from District 3, a girl, didn't come home either. There was only one survivor that year. One winner of the Games.

Depending on how you look at it, it's either the only game that matters, or not a game at all.

I said about the cameras - you'd think, with the tech we still have, and more coming from our District in particular, that we'd have a better way to kill the zombies.

But there isn't one. Armies, they swarm; snipers working alone, or in small teams, have a far better chance. And it has to be people. Zombies don't react to machines - send in drones, and they stay dormant. No one knows why.

Fire's not thorough enough. There's the thing with dormant zombies, and if you miss a zombie when you're clearing an area, you have exactly the same problem as if you had five. As for biochem, any dispersable agent that can kill a zombie makes the land poisonous for regular humans for years to come. And poisoned land is the last thing we want. The most precious thing left in the world is land to grow crops in.

The Districts are safe havens, though we keep the fences between them up and powered in case zombies do break out and a District has to be quarantined off. But they're not enough to feed us.

So, every year, twenty people are selected for smarts and fitness, two for each District, and trained for four months at the Capitol. Then they send them into an uncleared area. They get supplies, ammunition, everything they want - but they have to live rough, and they have to survive on their own.

They also have to be ready to kill each _other_ , when someone's been bitten but while they still look human, even if they're begging for their lives. There's no cure. The virus moves fast. There've been one or two people over the Reclamation who preserved their humanity by amputating a bitten limb minutes after the bite occurred - but that's _it_. And while the Selected few get any kind of equipment they want, you can't equip someone - let alone train them - to do field surgery that's that serious. Too many ways that can go wrong.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Sounds like something anyone would sign up for.

I mean, when we were thirteen, we just thought about the glory. And it is glorious. They can send you in with night vision goggles and insulated sleeping bags and drop you off drone packages of your favourite food, but they can't change what's at stake, the whole point of it. One bite and you're done. So they make a really big deal out of everyone who goes in. "We salute you who will die for us" or however that thing goes. Go into a Games, and if you come out, you can write your own ticket.

And it matters, right? In the last few years of Games, they've been clearing this big sweep that used to be farmland, before the zombies, back when this was America. Finally, last year, they finished the fence and opened up a whole new District, District 11. All the survivors from the previous year's Games came to the ceremony and got treated like kings, and you could see - _they_ did that. That's what they bought with what they did. Now District 11's being re-settled. I guess in a few years there'll be 22 candidates in a Games.

But that future was unknowable, and in the all-too-concrete present, here I was. I was eighteen years old, it was Games selection time again, and the little tiny dream I'd had of being a basketball star had been punctured - I could hear it hissing like a bicycle tire in the back of my mind.

In the forefront of my mind, I was thinking about Alistair.

The round-eyed thirteen-year-old I'd been would be thinking that of course I had to sign up for this Games, because it was what we'd promised each other. Alistair not being around just made it _more_ important. I could go in _for_ him. Never mind that he never went in for me - he went in for Alistair, and the world.

The real me - eighteen-year old Slater me - thought that promises were important, sure, but it was dumb to hold on to the dreams you had as a kid just because they were dreams. People change, and dreams you hold on to that tightly turn into nightmares if you're not careful.

But all those dreams came back to me - what it would be like to hear everyone call me Orlando and crown me with the year's crown as the choppers came to lift me out of the Arena at the end of the Games. I'd be bloody, of course, and my lips would be cracked from thirst, and I'd wear a fearsome grin, and behind me the other Games winners would straggle up, but I'd be the proudest of all...

Like I'd said, I didn't know what I wanted, and I'd kind of been facing away from the decision, until someone else made that basketball decision for me.

I remembered Alistair before they took him for the Games. After they make the Selection they give you a week or so to say your words to everyone who means anything to you, in case you don't come back. Some people bolt in that time. They sign up, but being chosen is too much. Alistair thought they did that on purpose - better someone bolt before the Games than go crazy in the middle of them. They wanted people to have the best chance of survival.

Except maybe they didn't. Up until the second-last night, Alistair was stoked about it all - we were joking that he'd come out with all the experience and mentor me through my own Games, so that he was a multi-millionaire celebrity and I was the tail to his comet - but he got quiet.

"Only two people came back last year," he said.

"Yeah, well, they cleared half a prairie," I said. The wilderness Arenas are hard; low visibility and scarce original manmade shelter, although the climate's not bad.

"There's a rumour," he said. "You know there are bets on the Games."

"Yeah," I said, though I didn't really want to talk about that. I didn't want to think about people betting on him. I mean, I'd joke with him if he said it first, but... I didn't want that.

"Some say they rig it," he said. "They want a real winner. Some say that they set you up so that you have to kill each other. So that there's only one winner of the Games."

"That's dumb," I said. "What about the people who try for Games after Games? How do you think they'd do that if they kept killing people off? Why would they keep the experienced snipers from coming through?"

"Yeah, I know," he said, and he shook it off, and by the time we said goodbye to him for real, he was pumped again.

But I kept thinking about that. Not his theory; that was crazy. What I remember was how just before he went into the Arena, even Alistair was scared. Even Alistair was arguing himself out of going, just like I was.

Sometimes you know you have to do something just by how hard you're fighting against it. That's how I knew how that toss needed to land.

Wish me luck.


End file.
